


Mother

by kylogram



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, For the people who don't like Mother's Day, Gen, Mother's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:53:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6788386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kylogram/pseuds/kylogram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben’s mother is the best mother in the world. He knows that and everybody knows that, too.</p><p>She’s the most beautiful and the most smartest. She’s the kindest and bravest and most important in the galaxy. She saved the galaxy. She saved them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mother

**Author's Note:**

> So this sparked out of a prompt on [the kink meme](http://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/4613.html?thread=10054405#cmt10054405%20target=), but as much as I love Leia, I am kind of unable to relate to Mother's Day feelings and I figured there might be other people feeling that too. 
> 
> Also, everybody jokes about the "daddy issues" in Star Wars but like, there's plenty of mother-related trauma to pick from too so. Here is this. It's a Ben and Leia fic mainly but it is peppered with drabbles about the different characters and their own issues. 
> 
> Hope you like, and hope the bug bites me and I can post Chapter 3 of Finest Work soon! I've been a bit off lately. Thank you for reading <3 xxx

**_Ben_ **

Ben’s mother is the best mother in the world. He knows that and everybody knows that, too.

She’s the most beautiful and the most smartest. She’s the kindest and bravest and most important in the galaxy. She saved the galaxy. She saved them all.

Ben loves his mother, she didn’t just give him life, she gave life to everyone. She is often busy but he knows it’s just because she cares about everyone as much as she cares about him and wants everyone to be safe. He knows she loves him. He knows. He has to remember.

Every year the other kids ask if she’ll come to the Mother’s Day celebrations in school, and every year he says yes. Every year, the kids that don’t like him, don’t know him and often fear him, gather around him to tell him how lucky he is to have the mom that he has. They tell him they want to meet her. They tell him how lucky he is to be loved by her.

Every year, he sits next to Poe Dameron, who doesn’t have a mother, and both spend the day alone trying to be happy for everyone else.

Every year he says to Poe, “I think she was busy, it’s okay, what do you want to do?” once group presentations and speeches are over and it’s time for the kids to just huddle close to their moms while they eat. Every year Poe smiles and they go throw rocks at the lake.

Every year, the celebrations start out fine, but it never lasts. He always ends up hurting, and the voice in his head tells him all the bad things he’s doing – all the bad things he’ll do.

Every kid walks home with their parents, and he travels in the back of the speeder with Poe, with Poe’s dad. “Sorry, Ben, your mom was busy today but we’ll drop you at home and she’ll see you before bedtime,” he says, and Ben hates it but he always ends up crying.

Ben knows he’s the worst kid, the most bad and wrong of all. The most entitled and rudest and dumbest and weakest – because he can’t help but cry when his mom isn’t there, and he can’t help but hope, year after year, that this time he’ll be more important than the galaxy. Because he wants his mom to care more about a single kid, than about the millions and trillions in the planets and that’s wrong. He’s wrong. That’s why dad leaves too.

He knows he’s all those things because Poe doesn’t have no mom anymore, but he’s not crying.

He knows he’s all those things because Poe has told him he understood why his mom fought for the galaxy, rather than staying with him.

He knows he’s all those things because when he gets off the speeder to walk into an empty home, Poe – the one that does have a right to be upset – is the one to comfort him.

**_Poe_ **

When Poe was small, he had a mother.

She was beautiful and smart and loving and one hell of a pilot.

She told him stories about the galaxy and the rebellion. She told him she loved him and that he’d be one hell of a pilot too.

When she died, his father didn’t blame him. When he joined the Resistance, his father didn’t say a word.

She did the right thing. His father loves him. He tells himself that over and over as he picks the most dangerous missions.

If anyone dies, he’ll make damn sure it isn’t a mother.

**_Rey_ **

To Rey, ‘mother’ doesn’t mean much. Her mother is a fuzzy memory, it’s a warm set of hands holding her against a chest. She thinks that’s her mother, but it could be anyone.

Could have been her father. Could have been a droid. Could be Unkar Plutt himself.

In Jakku, it’s not celebrated. The travelers and workers tend to have noone to love, nobody to celebrate. It’s better that way, she thinks if she was with others unlike her, she’d be sadder.

Still, year after year, she circled the day among her wall marks. ‘Just in case,’ she told herself.

**_Finn_ **

Everybody apologizes to Finn before they mention their mothers.

But despite the training and conditioning, life wasn’t that bad. He was fed and kept clean and given purpose. He knows – from the footage he was shown growing up – that not all children have that. He knows that some people in the Resistance, haven’t had that.

He may have had the wrong type of mother, but he had a mother. It fed him and taught him and protected him and punished him.

Finn’s mother was the First Order. He doesn't think that any of his friends would like to hear that.

**_Phasma_ **

Some troopers jokingly call Phasma ‘mom’. Not to her face, but they do.

It’s the same name the other troopers from her generation gave her. She looked out for them and they were orphans, like her. She didn’t mind about it – until she did.

When she got promoted, the medics asked if she wanted them to remove the contraceptive device in her womb, as she was allowed to have offspring now. She asked them to remove her womb entirely, instead.

All those kids are dead – her time will be up any day now. She won’t let the story repeat itself.

**_Hux_ **

When the Empire fell, so did Hux’s mother.

She was not dead – but she was never the same. Hux was only four.

Hux remembers trying, when he was young. He remembers talking to her, bringing her gifts he made with scraps in secret. He remembers trying to get her to hold him – how she just looked blankly at him, the half-smile on her lips that never left and the gray, empty space behind those beautiful eyes that didn’t recognize him.

When he’s made General, he abolishes all holidays on base. He doesn’t dare to only abolish the one that matters.

_**Leia** _

“Happy Mother’s Day, General,” a handful of voices greet her as soon as she walks into the meeting room and she wishes she hadn’t been too kind to forbid people from doing that.

It’s the young ones, as always, the ones that don’t actually have a mother and have pinned her on the sky as the greatest woman to ever live. As if she herself had been mother to the Resistance, instead of not being a mother at all.

There are new faces this time, Rey and Finn, who for all intents and purposes are war orphans like Snap and Poe and Jess had been. There is food and candles, and Poe approaches her quietly with a plain box.

“It’s from all of us,” Poe adds although she knows it’s not true.

“Thank you, all,” she says, struggling not to sound uncomfortable and managing somewhat. She remembers all the gifts that Poe gave her throughout the years, after Ben was gone. Remembers how when Shara died she’d visit Poe to give him a hug, before heading home to hold her own son. She tries to distract herself by opening the box to find a beautiful scarf.

They all smile and hug and then go about their day, and Leia wears the scarf because it’d be a worse reminder not to.

‘Happy Mother’s Day, mama!’ the little boy in her memories says, smiling big as though she won’t be able to tell he cried all day. He says that every year. He says it at four, when she sleeps through the celebrations, at five when she simply has no strength to show up because Poe’s mother is dead, he says it at eight and nine and ten. He says it at eleven, twelve; as a young teen boy through video messages, year after year, while the mothers of all the other padawans are eating and laughing in the background.

‘Happy Mother’s Day, General,’ says the boy, now a man, looking out towards space from a cold military base that, like every place he has lived in, is not home.

Like every time before, the General can feel it, and like every time before, guilt and love and shame flood her. But, like every time before, she knows there is no point in saying sorry – so she just smiles, and hopes that the man, still her little Ben, can feel it too.


End file.
